In The Poetry

This is the last of the ‘Wire Through the Heart’ poems – it’s called ‘Malenki Robot’ which in Russian, or rather in the Hungarian version of the Russian phrase, ‘malenki robot’ is ‘a little light work’. The Red Army rounded up about a tenth of the men and put them in camps for what they [...]

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, [...]

George Square

My seventy seven year old father
Put his reading glasses on
To help my mother do the buttons
On the back of her dress.
‘What a pair the two of us are!’
my mother said, ‘Me with my sore wrist,
you with your bad eyes, your soft thumbs!’

And off they went, my two parents
To march against the war in Iraq,
Him [...]

The Red Sea

Lulled in a nook of North West Bay,
The water swells against the sand,
Hardly more liquid than Venetian glass,
In which clear surface, just a little way
From shore, some four or five petite yachts pass
With languid ease, apparently unmanned,
Adrift along the day,

Imagining a breeze to fan
Their motion, though there’s none. Siobhan
Reaches a giant hand down [...]

Hamnavoe Market

They drove to the Market with ringing pockets.

Folster found a girl
Who put lipstick wounds on his face and throat,
Small and diagonal, like red doves.

Johston stood beside the barrel.
All day he stood there.
He woke in a ditch, his mouth full of ashes.

Grieve bought a balloon and a goldfish.
He swung through the air.
He fired shotguns, rolled [...]

The Waste Land

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went [...]

The name of this poem is ‘The Pieces that Fall to Earth’ and it has something to do with the sublime. The pieces, that are referred to in the poem I actually think, well maybe I should’t give it away, but I think of them as pieces of the dome of heaven.
The Pieces that [...]

This is a poem for my grandmother, in rubaiyat stanzas as Englished by Edward Fitzgerald. My grandmother lived and died in Tehran, and here I’m thinking of her in London while driving.

Rubaiyat
for Telajune

Beyond the view of crossroads ringed with breath
her bed appears, the old-rose covers death
has smoothed and stilled; her fingers lie inert,
her nail-file [...]

Not Yet My Mother

Yesterday I found a photo
of you at seventeen,
holding a horse and smiling,
not yet my mother.

The tight riding hat hid your hair,
and your legs were still the long shins of a boy’s.
You held the horse by the halter,
your hand a fist under its huge jaw.

The blown trees were still in the background
and the [...]

The Slow Man

The phone rings
But never long enough
For the Slow Man.

By the time
The set’s switched on
His favourite programme’s over.

His tea grows cold
From cup to lip.
His soup evaporates.

He laughs, eventually,
At jokes long since
Gone out of fashion.

Sell-by dates
And limited special offers
Defeat him.

He comes home
With yesterday’s paper
And reads it…tomorrow.